Lessons Are Loud and Clear for Teens

The cameras caught two of the defendants covering their faces with their hands as the guilty verdicts rolled in and piled up. The third sat impassively for a time, either stunned or numbed, before hanging his head. Later, two of them began sobbing as they were handcuffed while still sitting at the defense table.

If there was a full-circle moment in the nearly 3-year-old saga of the so-called Haidl rape trial, that was it.

If there was a moment that cried out that teenagers’ bad behaviors have potentially disastrous consequences, that was it.

If the trial that ended Wednesday in an Orange County courtroom was a cautionary tale for sexually promiscuous teens -- boys and girls alike -- the sight of the three defendants contemplating state prison put the exclamation point on the tale.

That’s because it was impossible to view the courtroom scene -- even if on TV, as I did -- and not flash back to the laughing and dancing on the night that spawned the charges. On that July night in 2002, the three boys -- one of them the son of an assistant sheriff -- engaged in a series of lascivious acts with a then-16-year-old girl who’d had varying degrees of sex with each of them the night before and then returned alone to their lair the next night.

On that second go-round, the girl began drinking and lapsed into what she said was a drunken stupor. As the boys alternately penetrated the apparently unconscious girl with a cigarette, juice bottle and pool cue, loud music blared and the boys whooped it up as they videotaped the ensuing 20 minutes of debauchery.

I sat through the key moments of the boys’ first trial last year that ended in a hung jury. I had no desire to sit through a second one, knowing the central element again would be the video that we couldn’t see. The first jury couldn’t reach verdicts, but the second one did. Interestingly, however, it didn’t return guilty verdicts on the rape charge but convicted them on various sexual assault charges involving the objects.

It was the verdict that had to be delivered.

It had to, because the boys’ actions can’t be sloughed off as acceptable behavior. The defense team argued that “Jane Doe� was faking unconsciousness, but I had a hard time buying that because there was nothing that suggested the four of them -- the three boys, who were 17 at the time, or the girl -- were in on such a scenario.

The absolute truth of that may never be known.

Still, I argued from long before the first trial convened that the case should have been settled without a trial. Some readers took that as defense of the boys, although I also said they deserved punishment.

I had argued that prosecutors grossly overcharged the case and that no jury would send the boys to prison for the 20 years or more that the charges carried. The first jury didn’t -- and the second had fewer charges to consider -- but we’ll have to wait until one of the jurors elaborates to find out why this group of 12 saw the case differently than the first.

The boys’ fates rest with Judge Francisco P. Briseno, who presided over both trials and who will get an earful from defense and prosecutors on the appropriate sentences.

It won’t be easy for the judge. My mail over the last year or so included diversely opposite opinions: that the boys deserve the maximum, or that they deserve some measure of leniency because the girl helped create the situation that escalated into the criminal acts.

I can’t imagine the judge ordering probation, but I think he should rule on the lighter end of the sentencing scale. Even that, however, should send a loud and clear message through “The O.C.� teen scene and beyond.

And that message has to be: To girls who think it’s cool or necessary to engage in promiscuous sex, think of Jane Doe.

And to boys who think “easy� girls are fair game for whatever sordid thoughts enter their minds, think of the three men being led out in handcuffs and now in fear of what’s to come.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.